AgentCore Runtime Gains Persistent Interactive Shell Sessions for Agents

Full analysis

AWS AgentCore Runtime now supports interactive shell sessions, giving agents persistent terminal access to their sandboxed microVM environments. Unlike one-shot command execution, these shells maintain state across commands — environment variables, working directories, and running processes persist for the lifetime of a session — with up to 10 concurrent shell sessions per runtime session. This significantly expands the kind of long-horizon, stateful tasks agents can perform, such as multi-step builds, testing, and deployments without losing context between steps.